Mobile broadband help
 

I currently have VM 20mb BB at home but after the price increases I am thinking of leaving them for mobile broadband to be used in the house, I am sick of paying for a phone line I don't use. I currently have a three one plan on my mobile and tethered speeds to my laptop seem good for browsing, however I like the odd game on my PS3 online and worry that it won't be usable.

I hear that Three now have a faster MiFi which gets better then 3G speeds so wondered if anyone had one of these and there thoughts.

Haven't been over here for a while but came to ask for advice about ditching my landline in favour of MBB, so your post is well-timed.

I've had 3 MBB almost since the beginning (over 4 years?). The early years were hugely frustrating with outages and long periods of time when speeds slowed so much as to make dial-up faster. My guess is that the take-up of the service used to exceed the capacity of the server/cell.

Over the last year or so, things have got vastly better. The trully appalling helpdesk has had a complete makeover and is now acceptable but I still wouldn't want to go back to them with a complex problem (I think it's a different helpdesk than the generally good mobile phone one).

The service itself though is now very, very good. I recently bought one of the premium faster dongles and have been getting speeds of over 7mbps... sometimes. At peak times this can slow to less than 1mbps which is a pain because streaming becomes impossible at these speeds, but I can organise myself to live with it. Generally speaking, I'm pretty happy with it at the moment.

Managing your accounts is really easy with their dashboard and I buy several 3gb/30day/£15 top-ups at a time. They just queue up and 3 help themselves to another £15 worth if I use more than 3gb or at the end of each 30 day period. 3gb has been okay but as downloads get bigger, I suspect that that I might have to get the 7gb/£25 one. A contract of some sort might be the answer but I'm a bit nervous about commiting myself to something that I might want to change sooner...

Both me and the wife have iPhones on the 3 PAYG/£15/eat-as-much-as-you-like and, like you, I'm thinking of ditching my BT landline. The last bill was well over £100 which was mostly call plan, services, rental and other fixed costs. Two lots of 300 minutes on the 3 package is fine.

I've also bought myself a 3 MBB router though I haven't fixed it up yet, mainly because it's cheaper to use the mobiles than the MBB so I don't really need WiFi (apart from iPhone updates and a few obscure applications).

The things that are stopping me from scrapping my landline are:

1. The cost to friends phoning us on our mobiles

2. The cost to us for phoning 0800 (15p per minute) and 0844 (35p) numbers.

3. 3 MBB is very good at the moment but I know from experience that things can go wrong and how frustrating it can be.

Useful to know what you think and if anyone else has ditched their landline.

Hope this helps.

Ooops! Sorry for the ramble...

Been landlineless for a couple of years now. I switched to 3 mbb after vodafone mbb became unuseable, actually i was never happy with it. 3 was much better, i live in a semirural area but theres a 3 mast in the village. Ive been using payg sim cards and just started using a reseller that uses the 3 network, exactly the same.
Mbb is ok if you dont download lot, for that i take my laptop to work. Watching vids eats your data though!

Virgin don't require a phone line for there BB or are you on there Adsl package

Thanks... yes, I think I'm going to go for it and scrap the landline. The 3gb/£15 isn't quite enough but even if I ended up getting the 7gb/£25 top-ups, I'm still going to be better off.

Pretty sure they do a 10GB/£15 month on 1 month rolling contract. Never had a contract with them so wouldn't know if its any good.
Might be worthwhile looking at the microSIM deals as well and getting an adaptor. Just check they allow tethering.

Yes it works out very cheap if you don't want a landline and don't download/stream videos. It's also easy to keep a handle on your use. When I've run out I don't top up. I use my phone for tethering and order a fresh sim usually from ebay.

Just a quick update - I did the dirty deed and had the BT landline taken out last week. Predictably, 3 chose this weekend to have problems with their 3G/HSDPA signal here... the internet signal on our two iPhones went AWOL too. Fortunately, it appears to have been a temporary fault cos all is working well this morning, 7 mb on the PC and 4.5 mb on the iphone.

I'm going to stick with PAYG for the time being because I think there are going to be some major developments with MBB.

I've also seen a Vodaphone three month unlimited data SIM on eBay for £39.99 which seems outstanding value (except it's no where nearly as quick as 3).

Cheers